the end of the year

from erin boyle's blog a few weeks ago, i got my end-of-year-quote.

annie dillard wrote:

"how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

this wasn't my best year, because i'm in the long dark tunnel of "what will i do?" life has yet to assume its true shape. thank goodness for my bae, eve!

from Epicurus

"Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city"

from "Miles City, Montana" by Alice Munro

"I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to. But on trips there was no difficulty. I could be talking to Andrew, talking to the children and looking at whatever they wanted me to look at--a pig on a sign, a pony in a field, a Volkswagen on a revolving stand--and pouring lemonade into plastic cups, and all the time those bits and pieces would be flying together inside me. The essential composition would be achieved. This made me hopeful and lighthearted. It was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper."

--Alice Munro, "Miles City, Montana"

east north carolina in the summertime

from Madame Bovary

"As for Emma, she never once questioned herself to see if she loved him. Love, she believed, had to come, suddenly, with a great clap of thunder and a lightning flash, a tempest from heaven that falls upon your life, like a devastation, scatters your ideals like leaves and hurls your very soul into the abyss. Little did she know that up on the roof of the house, the rain will form a pool if the gutters are blocked, and there she would have stayed feeling safe inside, until one day she suddenly discovered the crack right down the wall."

-- from Madame Bovary, Flaubert (trans. Wall)

From the Glass Essay

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is
to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up
blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.

--The Glass Essay, Anne Carson

The water/sky situation in the arctic

"A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things--how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver--and this inability enhanced my oppression." --Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who can do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless. But he who understands also loves, notices, sees… . The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love… . Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes. 

-Paracelsus (with thanks to Love Dog)

Paracelsus: the retail experience.